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Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement

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Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement Forms of Machines, Forms of Movement Benoît Turquety for Hadrien Fac-similes In a documentary produced in 1996-1997, American filmmaker Stan Bra- khage, who spent much of his life painting and scratching film, stated that One of the major things in film is that you have 24 beats in a second, or 16 beats or whatever speed the projector is running at. It is a medium that has a base beat, that is intrinsically baroque. And aesthetically speaking, it’s just appalling to me to try to watch, for example, as I did, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin on video: it dulls all the rhythm of the editing. Because video looks, in comparison to the sharp, hard clarities of snapping individual frames, and what that produces at the cut, video looks like a pudding, that’s virtually uncuttable, like a jello. It’s all ashake with itself. And furthermore, as a colorist, it doesn’t interest me, because it is whatever color anyone sets their receptor to. It has no fixed color.1 Each optical machine produces a specific mode of perception. Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren also devoted an essential part of his work to research on the material of film itself, making films with or without camera through all kinds of methods, drawing, painting, scratching film, develop- ing a reflection on what a film frame is and what happens in the interval between two images. Yet today his work is distributed by the National Film Board of Canada only in digital format, and such prestigious institutions as the Centre Pompidou in Paris project it that way – even as the compression of digital files required by their transfer on DVD pretty much abolishes the fundamental cell that is the single frame. 1 Brakhage on Brakhage, dir. Colin Still, 1996-1997, in By Brakhage: An Anthology, DVD set, Criterion, 2003. 276 BENOÎT TUrqUety Beyond these singular cases, the discontinuation of film as a medium to the benefit of digital media raises a number of issues at the moment. As it happens, these issues – originating in equal parts in audiences, critics and professionals dealing with a transformation of their tools, methods and general professional structures – start from a common premise: “one can barely tell the difference” between film and digital. The stakes of the transition between formats are mostly economic, occasionally practical, sometimes tied to sporadic differences in rendering, but in the end these are just moving photographic images – or so the assumption goes. Still, differences are crucial because the modes of production of these moving images lead to singular modes of perception, at a level rarely explored by analysis. The transition between media should be thought in the context of the “facsimile” as developed by Erwin Panofsky in a 1930 text: […] I wish and I hope that we will learn to improve and will continue to make “better” facsimile reproductions. It is because of these advances, and not despite them, that we will be increasingly adept at distinguishing the original from its facsimile reproduction. Furthermore, it is because of these advances, and not despite them, that we will increasingly regard facsimile reproductions with benefit and, even, enjoyment.2 The film watched in video is a facsimile of the original, a certain amount of “information” or characteristics of which it conveys, while some others disappear or undergo transformation. At any rate, it may not be defined as anything but a facsimile.3 Still, as Panofsky also points out,4 the nature and the scope of transformations remain to be evaluated for each work according to the degree of dependence of form on the material that embod- ies it. If we are to grasp what is at stake in this shift to digital, we need to understand and identify with accuracy the specificities of each machine and the viewing conditions it produces, and more generally expand this research to the history of dispositives of moving or of animated images – if these two notions do in fact refer to the same thing. This necessity was already spelled out by Jonathan Crary in his Techniques of the Observer (1990): 2 Erwin Panofsky, “Original und Faksimilereproduktion,” Der Kreis. Zeitschrift für künstler- ische Kultur (Spring 1930), available in English as “Original and Facsimile Reproduction,” trans. Timothy Grundy, in Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics 57-58 (Spring-Autumn 2011): 337. 3 On this question and some of its implications for film studies, see the “Statement on the Use of Video in the Classroom” issued by the Society for Cinema Studies Task Force on Film Integrity, chaired by John Belton, Cinema Journal 30.4 (Summer 1991): 3-6. 4 Panofsky, “Original und Faksimilereproduktion”: 337-38. FSORM OF MACHINES, FORMS OF MOVEMENT 277 […] there is a tendency to conflate all optical devices in the nineteenth century as equally implicated in a vague collective drive to higher and higher standards of verisimilitude. Such an approach often ignores the conceptual and historical singularities of each device.5 Indeed, each machine involves in its very form a certain conception of its task, its ends and the means to achieve them, and in return, these means have consequences on the nature of the result. Each machine is thus poten- tially rich in theoretical lessons, be it through visual experience or through an epistemological reflection on the historical conditions of its conception. Taking into account the technical level, machines and practices, from the camera to the script, from flatbed editing machines to the architecture of movie theaters, is rather rare in film theory (except in archival literature, for some aspects6) and raises specific methodological problems. The tech- nological analysis of machines should be confronted with their production, with the discourses around them and with their concrete uses, whether dominant or marginal. When it comes to the evolution of technical objects themselves, it should also relate the respective logics of conception, usage and industrialization. The Form of a Machine: A Surprising Zoetrope The clinical study of a singular case, based on some important technical aspects in the representation of moving images shared by nineteenth- century optical toys and the first cinematographic machines, will help shed light on a few issues. Charles Francis Jenkins was one of the first important “pioneers” in the technologies of cinema and television. With Thomas Armat, he notably invented a projector, the Phantoscope, which was presented to the public in September 1895. In 1916, he was also the founder of one of the most impor- 5 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990). Crary unfortunately does not apply this principle with much precision, contenting himself with a general scheme of the camera obscura without distinguishing its various historical concretizations. Also, when it comes to the nineteenth century, he only particularizes the stereoscope, the kaleidoscope and devices for the analysis and the synthesis of movement, merged into a third category. 6 Among these, I will mention the evolution of mediums (nitrate film, acetate cellulose film), the chemistry of coloring processes or “natural” colors, projection speeds, aspect ratios, etc. See for instance Paolo Cherchi Usai, Silent Cinema: An Introduction (London: BFI, 2000). 278 BENOÎT TUrqUety tant professional institutions of technicians, in film and later in television, the Society of Motion Picture Engineers.7 The organization immediately published a periodical,8 for which Jenkins himself wrote one of the earli- est historical pieces in October 1920, “History of the Motion Picture.” The contribution begins with what was already becoming common practice: going back to the dawn of time to search for a lost origin of cinema and trace it in more or less relevant and even improbable phenomena. According to Jenkins, the “first motion picture mechanism we have any record of”9 was the Zoetrope, whose origin he dated back to Lucretius. He briefly describes the optical toy that “you all doubtless well know,” presenting an illustration without commenting on it.10 However, the interest of the illustration (Fig. 1) is that the machine it features is not at all a “common specimen” of the Zoetrope, to use the language of taxonomists. The Zoetrope is an optical toy invented independently in 1834 by William George Horner (Great Britain) and Simon von Stampfer (Austria), both mathematicians (that fact alone deserves a closer look). For reasons that remain to be identified, it was commercialized only in 1867. The Zoetrope comprises a cylinder with slits cut at regular intervals, which can rotate around its axis; within the cylinder, a sequence of images placed between the slits present a series of patterns describing a given subject in movement. When the cylinder is spun and the viewer looks through the slits, the images in the series appear to move. Yet the Zoetrope presented in Jenkins’s article involves two unusual characteristics. First, its cylinder is oriented vertically, which was extremely rare. In principle, the cylinder in a Zoetrope is horizontal, primarily because the strips of images have to be easy to change and should fit the edges of the cylinder perfectly. In a spinning vertical cylinder, the strips risk falling off or have to be fastened carefully, which complicates the opera- tion with no apparent benefit. Second, one might add that there is a logic 7 Today the organization is called the SMPTE, or Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers. 8 First titled Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, it later became the Journal of the SMPE, then the Journal of the SMPTE. 9 Charles Francis Jenkins, “History of the Motion Picture,” Transactions of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (Oct. 1920), in A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television: An Anthology from the Pages of The Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, ed.
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